Leadership: Six Studies in World Strategy

Rejecting the prevailing strategies based on dynastic loyalty or confessional affiliation, Richelieu instead oriented France’s internal and external policies in accord with ‘reasons of state’ (raisons d’état): that is, the flexible pursuit of the national interest based entirely on a realistic judgment of circumstances.

The Soviet Union considered the rebuilding of the West German economy and the progressive establishment of German political institutions as a direct challenge. The communist threat began to eclipse the Western democracies’ fear of a resurgent Germany when, in June 1948, the Soviet Union blockaded the access routes to Berlin from the surrounding Sov

A country which has lost two world wars, undergone three revolutions, committed the crimes of the Nazi era, and seen its material wealth wiped out twice in a generation, is bound to suffer from deep psychological scars. There is an atmosphere of hysteria, a tendency toward unbalanced actions. A German friend, a creative writer, said to me that Germ

He spoke calmly, only occasionally using his hands for emphasis. Always well prepared on contemporary issues, he never discussed his personal life in my presence. Nor did he inquire into my own, though – given the perennial effectiveness of the German bureaucracy – surely he knew my family history and understood the paths onto which fate had placed

The duties of nations, as he viewed them, were their own justification; oratorical embellishment could only distract from that basic understanding. Adenauer’s unobtrusive style also suggested the role he foresaw for the new Germany in helping to shape a new Europe through consensus.

For de Gaulle, politics was not the art of the possible but the art of the willed.

As Charles de Gaulle observed in his meditation on leadership, The Edge of the Sword (1932), the artist ‘does not renounce the use of his intelligence’ – which is, after all, the source of ‘lessons, methods, and knowledge’. Instead, the artist adds to these foundations ‘a certain instinctive faculty which we call inspiration’, which alone can provi

‘Statesmen are not called upon only to settle easy questions. These often settle themselves. It is where the balance quivers, and the proportions are veiled in mist, that the opportunity for world-saving decisions presents itself.’[1]

Whatever their personal characteristics or modes of action, leaders inevitably confront an unrelenting challenge: preventing the demands of the present from overwhelming the future. Ordinary leaders seek to manage the immediate; great ones attempt to raise their society to their visions.